The Lady from Arezzo

by Alfred Brendel

  The programme for my first solo recital in Graz, as well as its title, was devised by myself. It was called ‘The Fugue in Piano Literature’, and would have frightened me in later years. At that stage, I didn’t know what ‘nerves’ were. The success of this debut calmed, for the time being, the nerves of my anxious mother.

  In 1949 I appeared with an orchestra for the first time. It was nothing less than Beethoven’s so-called, and misnamed, ‘Emperor’ Concerto that I performed in Graz in the Stefaniensaal, a concert hall I still consider one of the finest. Among other piano concertos that I tackled from early on were Weber’s Konzertstück, the Schumann Concerto, Liszt’s Second Concerto and Mozart’s K. 503. It was a happy time without televisions, mobile phones, computers, Facebook and Twitter. The voices of Hitler and Goebbels no longer invaded the loudspeakers, and many people, after the end of the horrible war, were sceptical and obliging. It was also an exciting time as all the contemporary art that had been inaccessible gradually resurfaced. My curiosity for everything that is new in art has stayed with me throughout my life.

  From 1950 I lived in Vienna, at first with a great-aunt who only after several years allowed me to hire a piano. Consequently, I had to throw myself on the mercy of friends and acquaintances in order to be able to practise for an hour or two. This had the benefit that I didn’t practise too much. A pianist can ruin himself by too much practice. The house in which my great-aunt lived was, at the time, one of the many Viennese buildings that provided running water only outside the apartment, to be collected with buckets.

  In the early 1950s, three things happened. First, I started to make records, an activity that would continue for half a century. Second, I did a concert tour of Spain and Portugal with a chamber orchestra that, apart from the conductor, consisted entirely of women. From Vienna, we drove in a bus covering ten thousand kilometres in four weeks. There was snow on the Montserrat while, in the valley below, the almond trees bloomed. Then came an invitation to accompany a Greek violinist in Athens. The trip by rail from Vienna through Yugoslavia lasted fifty-two hours. After the recital, the violinist said, ‘Can’t you stay on for another ten days? I’m supposed to play with the Athens orchestra as a soloist, and I would like you to take over my engagement.’ Thus, I did my first performance of Mozart’s Concerto in D minor. I borrowed the score, which still contained his written notes, from a pupil of Artur Schnabel.

  Vienna, in the early post-war years, was popular with a number of small and medium-sized American record companies. Among the first works that I recorded for a tiny label were late Liszt pieces and Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica, music that nobody knew. The record catalogue in those days was fairly thin. Fees were small, and recording contracts ridiculous. But I was grateful to have something that kept my head above water. At the age of twenty-five I made my first record for VOX, a company that later called itself Turnabout and kept me busy over the next ten years. My first VOX recording included, besides Balakirev’s Islamey, Stravinsky’s Petrushka Suite and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

  As well as recording a few Mozart concertos and some of Liszt’s paraphrases, I embarked on a recording of Beethoven’s complete piano works. It was a fortunate decision to start with his smaller sets of variations. They added something important to my knowledge of Beethoven: I realised that the purported Titan was also able to compose with a light hand, enjoy being witty, and demonstrate his own individual version of gracefulness. The player can learn to characterise, to give each variation its own specific flavour – just as long as it is not one of those variation works that retain the character of the theme.

  It was by chance that I finished the first of my three recordings of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas on my thirty-second birthday. There followed many concert performances of the sonata cycle, an undertaking that needed four or five attempts to settle down. Up until the age of seventy I particularly enjoyed doing cycles of the five Beethoven concertos. For the VOX recording of the Fifth Concerto, Zubin Mehta was my very young conductor, facing the Vienna Symphony for the first time. Later I would often join Zubin in Europe, North America and Israel.

  In the late 1950s, Michael Gielen made me learn the Piano Concerto by Arnold Schoenberg, which we then performed in Warsaw at the first international festival of contemporary music that had ever been mounted in Eastern Europe. The public, who had never heard this kind of music before, made us repeat the last movement. Nadia Boulanger, the famous Parisian composition teacher who had trained some of the Polish composers, sat sulking in the balcony. She was completely devoted to Stravinsky, who at the time had not yet discovered the music of the Second Vienna School. Warsaw was in those days a city in ruins above which towered the gigantic Palace of Culture. It had been erected by the Russians and is still there – too huge to be demolished. I’ve played the Schoenberg Concerto 68 times, made three recordings of it, and given premiere performances on three continents. It has remained a problem piece but one whose problems repay close consideration.

  Meanwhile, Mozart’s piano concertos and Schubert’s sonatas had become, as part of my repertoire, more and more important. In the years after the war sonatas by Schubert were rarely programmed. A performance of his four-movement A minor Sonata by Wilhelm Kempff helped to open my ears. Played in Vienna’s biggest concert hall, it showed me that these works need a bigger space to fully come to life, and that they should be played orchestrally, dramatically and cohesively. In this, the late sonatas differ from his impromptus, moments musicaux or piano chamber music, which, as it were, emerge from the piano, whereas the sonatas impose an orchestra on it. With the Wanderer Fantasy Schubert strikingly demonstrated that the work had gone far beyond the capabilities of contemporary keyboard instruments. The modern piano is so much better equipped to be turned into an orchestra with its sound, colour and dynamic range. In the 1960s, German television gave me the opportunity to make thirteen films encompassing the last seven years of Schubert’s life, from the Wanderer Fantasy to his final sonatas. Subsequently, I often performed these works over four evenings. Incidentally, the timespan within which Schubert composed his greatest instrumental works seems to coincide precisely with his affliction with syphilis. It took some time before the received opinion that Schubert’s music was too lyrical, too long and lacking in shape was left behind. Today, his sonatas are firmly established in the repertoire.

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  Since 1971, I have lived in London. That means that this is the place where I keep most of my books and music. But I still do a lot of travelling. The fact that I was born in northern Moravia, went to Yugoslavia as a child and moved from Zagreb to Austria before settling in London, combined with the life of a touring pianist – such a peripatetic existence has always seemed to me a blessing. It didn’t, however, need the Brexit vote to remind me that I’m a European.

  I value a certain degree of independence. I have never been part of an institution. I never organised a series of events or founded a club. The only crowd – to speak with Elias Canetti – that I am not wary of is the public of concerts and theatre.

  There were a number of reasons to settle in London. Before the disappearance of the Iron Curtain, Vienna felt to me rather provincial. Two things convinced me of London’s status as a musical metropolis: the Promenade Concerts and the Third Programme of the BBC. Where else does one find a series like the ‘Proms’ where throughout the whole summer up to eight thousand people gather to listen, evening after evening, to orchestral concerts that are also broadcast live? Both the Proms and the Third Programme were masterminded by Sir William Glock, a pupil of Schnabel. Glock had succeeded in freeing both institutions from their insularity, and in internationalising the performances of contemporary music. Before that, the Proms, gossip had it, were the only place where British composers could hear their work twice. The famous echo of the Albert Hall was later eliminated by round blue panels suspended from the ceiling. It is only fair to say that, since then, British music has become a great deal more internati
onal as well. It’s hard to imagine a more attentive audience than the standing ‘Promenaders’. Confronted with the contrasting elements of the hall’s interior, a French architect friend observed, ‘Half Colosseum, half brothel.’ (You may remember the red velvet draperies.) The Albert Hall turned out to be one of my musical homes. I played there 35 times including, within orchestral concerts, solo works such as Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations and Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy. But I never attended the final night. It displays a chauvinism that is not to my taste.

  The records I had made up till then were for smaller labels. A Beethoven recital at the Queen Elizabeth Hall – not one of my best – triggered a second phase of my career and mobilised three of the big companies, of which, for the rest of my concert life, Philips became my home address.

  It seemed clear to me what I would do after my final concerts in Vienna in December 2008: lecturing, presenting readings of my poetry, coaching string quartets, writing, travelling. What remained open was how long the impact of my playing would continue to resonate. I count myself lucky that my recordings, even most of the earlier ones, still seem to be available. There have been musicians who in no time fell into oblivion.

  What further remained to be seen was how my health would hold up. Here, there were surprises of which the breakdown of my hearing six years ago was the most inconvenient.

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  From the 1970s, I frequently went to America doing solo recitals mostly in the spring and appearing with orchestras mostly in their summer residencies. One of them I became particularly familiar with was Ravinia. There, the Chicago Orchestra plays right next door to a railway station, which made Sir Thomas Beecham remark that this was the only railway station with a resident symphony orchestra. An exceedingly noisy old-fashioned train invariably pulled into the station during the slow movement of my piano concerto. It is rather bizarre but not without its own peculiar charm that in these summer concerts music should be performed in the open air for thousands of people, some of whom were sitting on the lawn. The fluctuations of temperature were remarkable. I have seen the audience wrapped in blankets. On the other hand I have played three Beethoven concertos in one evening at 100ºF and 90 per cent humidity.

  Just once I dared to play a concerto without rehearsal. At five o’clock in the afternoon the telephone rang, and the manager of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra gave me the news that his soloist for the evening had just cancelled. Couldn’t I come over and play something? It turned out that a couple of months earlier the orchestra had been on tour with Mozart’s D minor Concerto. So I called a cab and, after a short conversation with the conductor, played the piece with Riccardo Chailly.

  In my experience, most conductors are helpful as long as they realise that the soloist thoroughly knows the score and isn’t asking for something absurd. Among the friendly conductors there were those who retained everything I had told them, and others who let me know, after I’d said three things, ‘Don’t tell me a fourth – I won’t remember it anyway.’ Very old conductors usually need to be accompanied by the soloist. There were only a few conductors I avoided playing with, not for personal reasons but because I knew that we were musically incompatible. I much enjoyed working with those with whom one could set up performances properly over a number of years. I am thinking above all of my various Beethoven cycles with James Levine and Simon Rattle.

  It is nice if conductors try to accommodate the soloist. But there are also a few who cultivate the habit of cutting short the soloist’s rehearsal time. This is bad behaviour, and provokes in the soloist a kind of murderous urge. Young players in particular are sometimes on the receiving end of such treatment.

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  I have often said that I have learned a great deal from listening to singers and conductors. The reason is that, for me, the sound of the piano is not the goal but the point of departure. It has to be transformed. To make the piano sing, to turn it into an orchestra is both possible and necessary.

  There are pianists who are not comfortable with an orchestra. They would rather steer clear from the constraints of ensemble playing and develop their own unfettered notion of rhythm and tempo. Is piano literature in its incomparable profusion not destined to liberate the player from superfluous shackles? Are not all those fantasias, toccatas, cadenzas and recitative-like passages its quintessence?

  Chopin, I willingly concede, is such a soloist’s composer. With some restrictions, young Schumann and young Liszt may also qualify. As for the rest, great piano composers have all been ensemble composers, some of them first and foremost. Their piano works are often closely connected to their orchestral, vocal and chamber music and to the discipline of rhythmic cooperation with all its necessary and possible flexibility as embodied by a good conductor.

  It seems to me highly unlikely that a great composer would sport two basically different rhythmic conceptions, one for solo and one for ensemble playing. My yardstick for rhythm and tempo is taken from the great orchestras and the best conductors. Tempo modifications that are not conductable, and unavailable to orchestral musicians, will, on the piano, be mostly superfluous. There are soloists who think that they may, or even need to, demonstrate all the liberties imaginable when there are no other players around who would get in the way of their spontaneity. I personally would much rather go the other way and listen, before playing a Beethoven sonata, to a good performance of a Beethoven quartet, not least with regards to respecting the score. Four musicians who have to play together are facing the same markings that, if they use a good edition, have been written down by the composer himself.

  In my younger years, great pianists were sometimes divided into two groups: Chopin players who were dealing predominantly with the Polish composer, and the performers of a larger, mostly Central European repertoire. It seemed rather obvious that, in order to play Chopin well, you had to specialise. It also helped when such pianists had Eastern European names such as Paderewski, Koczalski, Brailowsky, Uninsky, Niedzielski, Czerny-Stefańska, or Pachmann and Friedman. What counted was a highly personal refinement that took hold of the player to such a degree that it was hardly applicable to other composers. I had studied a fair number of Chopin’s works but soon noticed that the Central European orientation was the one I would pursue. In the 1960s, I made an exception and focused my attention on Chopin’s relatively neglected polonaises, which I coupled with a selection of Liszt’s Hungarian rhapsodies. I had been playing Liszt since my earliest performances at the Conservatory in Graz. Liszt’s music, at that time, did not have a good reputation. To me, the best of it has remained compelling enough throughout a lifetime. Dealing with Liszt, the pianist will be able to realise that technical skill should never be in the foreground. Liszt should not be treated as a piano circus but as music. Virtuosity never ought to be an end in itself but a means of expression. There are, among the Hungarian rhapsodies, pieces of genius provided that they are played with the necessary conviction.

  The last great Chopin player in the old sense was Alfred Cortot. His recording of the 24 Préludes from 1933 has to me remained a miracle. Throughout my life, it has never lost anything of its phenomenal freshness and daring. Meanwhile, Chopin, the bird of paradise, has been swallowed up by the musical mainstream.

  When I repeat that I have profited most from listening to singers and conductors, I do not want to diminish the lasting impact of a number of pianists. In my most excitable early years of listening it was particularly Edwin Fischer, Alfred Cortot and Wilhelm Kempff who in concerts and on recordings gave me an inkling of what I myself hoped later to accomplish. The playing of these three pianists was remarkably uneven. Kempff, a master of atmospheric playing, could be called an Aeolian harp – he sounded wonderful when the right wind blew. But the very best of these pianists’ performances have continued to serve as a yardstick. What, in all their diversity, did they have in common? They were great masters of sound and cantabile, and they were magicians of immediacy. When Fischer played another veil was lifted from t
he soul. You witnessed a combination of seraphic simplicity, refinement and nervous turmoil. In the best of Cortot’s recordings of Chopin’s Préludes, each of the 24 pieces has a unique, clearly distinguishable profile. At the same time, they are played as a cycle, in one big breath that ties the disparate characters together. The very first bars would at once establish the basic character of each piece with complete assurance; it was as if a kaleidoscope would be shaken, and the new constellation was instantly there. All three pianists were also great chamber musicians, two of them professional conductors as well: Cortot was responsible for important orchestral premieres in Paris; Fischer toured with his chamber orchestra. What they also shared was the need to create wider contexts, to connect, to show how one thing leads to another, and the first note to the last. Wilhelm Furtwängler, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, some of the great conductors among their contemporaries, struck me in a similar way. It may have been a symptom of this generation that it didn’t dissect but rather bound the components together. Listen to one of the most moving examples of this style, Edwin Fischer’s performance of the Largo of Bach’s F minor Concerto.

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  There are different ways of establishing a career. The early, sensational one as the winner of a major competition with extensive concert appearances and a recording contract does not guarantee continuous success. The danger is that an avalanche of publicity is all too speedily released and a flood of engagements descends on the young player who needs time to assemble a repertoire, learn about concert life from the inside and find a way of negotiating from the age of twenty to thirty as a human being. A gradual build-up is necessary, the development should continue, the interest of orchestras, the esteem of conductors and, last but not least, the response of the public should lead to re-engagements. The word development is crucial – the debut of a pianist, even if brilliant, may just give a hint of his or her talent while some violinists already at a young age are able to display a mastery that is available to pianists only later. And the public sometimes even has to get used to the way a performer looks. A pianist who onstage cuts a good figure and doesn’t move a facial muscle will have an easier time than those who are prone to producing grimaces, including myself. My own career, despite my having won a prize in 1949, was not sudden or sensational but progressed step by step. In hindsight, I’m very grateful for this. My potential was able to unfold in a style that was consistent with my largely independent way of working and thinking. Unlike many others I have never been impatient. I knew there was a talent but time would tell how sound it was and where it would lead. Of course, talent is not everything. What is needed as well is a good constitution, self-confidence and self-criticism, ambition and persistence, preferably without fanaticism, a good memory, good nerves, the gift of concentration, the readiness and joy of transmitting something to others, and sufficient scepticism not to take oneself all too seriously. One needs gravitas and lightness, flexibility – an openness to the many characters of the music – and, of course, luck.